I was really looking forward to this game. A modern RoboCop game with good reviews. Sounds like a unicorn to me, but I didn’t want to pay full price, so I waited for it to be on sale. I’m glad I did.
The first thing that strikes me is that it looks like a PS3 game. Why is the graphics so poor? Why are the characters dead in the face while speaking, and why are everyone moving like robots? I thought it was a stylistic choice and the graphics would swap to modern style half way through like The Messenger, but nope. PS3 graphics is what they’re going for. The only thing giving it away to be a PS5 game is the ray tracing in water puddles.
The city of Detroit is represented by one block. You return to this block over and over and enter different buildings for your quests. It is quite ridiculous when you’re used to citys like GTA that are huge, and have also been around since PS3. Guess they didn’t have a budget to do something like that. The city of Detroit doesn’t feel like a city. More like an neighborhood.
Then we have the action itself. It is a basic first person shooter, except that RoboCop is very slow and aiming is very clunky. At first I miss everything I try to aim at, and there is no aim assist on consoles. After a while I do get used to the chunkiness and the action gameplay turns out quite okay. I was expecting to quit out the game, but I actually stuck around until the end and that is because the shooting didn’t suck much.
The enemies are guys with guns. Sometimes they have armor. Sometimes there are a lot of guys with guns, and then it is considered a boss. You also fight some mechs, in which case you stand around shooting at it for 10 minutes, take an occasional health regen and then keep shooting. The only real boss is at the end, and that was completely disconnected from the rest of the story.
The story is quite bad, but the worst is the dialogue which is cringe as hell. It is so bad I fast forward parts of it to avoid it. It is full of 80’s stereotypical one-liners like “Freeze scumbag!” and the writers have some kind of humor that doesn’t click with me. At times it is just dumb, and other times it is sexist. It fits the scene though. Voice acting is also terrible, both from the protagonist and the other roles. The voices of the bad guys is cartoonish which might be intended, or not.
If I’m going to say something nice about this game, the sound of RoboCops gun is great. It makes it feel very satisfying to fire, and you are going to fire it a lot to it makes a difference. I also liked the upgrade system with the motherboard and its mini games. It was a fun take on upgrading your weapon. I also did enjoy that it stayed true to the movies and it tried to incorporate the same feeling.
I rate this game as BAD.
Replay 